The Forgotten Girl (33 page)

Thanks to the Office of Sponsored Programs at Western Kentucky University for a grant that helped with the writing of this novel. Thanks also to my friends and colleagues in the English Department at WKU, especially Rob Hale, Tom Hunley, David LeNoir, Mary Ellen Miller, and Dale Rigby.

Thanks to all my friends and family. Special thanks to Kristie Lowry for both her help and her humor.

Thanks to everyone at NAL for your support. And a big thanks to Loren Jaggers and Heather Connor for getting the word out.

My editor, Danielle Perez, is amazing. Thanks for your patience, wisdom, and wit.

My agent, Laney Katz Becker, is a dynamo. Thanks for your tireless work, high expectations, and vast knowledge. And thanks to everyone at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin Literary Agents.

Thanks to the readers, bloggers, booksellers, and librarians who keep books and stories alive.

And thanks, as always, to Molly McCaffrey for everything
else.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Jason and Hayden have a strained relationship, primarily due to Hayden’s struggles with addiction. Do you understand Jason’s reluctance to let Hayden back into his life? Would you let her back in?
   
2. Jason seems to realize that it was difficult for Hayden to grow up in his shadow. Do you think it’s challenging for younger siblings to establish their own identities as they grow up? Also, is there more pressure on an older sibling to set the tone in a family?
   
3. Sierra seems to be a bright, successful teenager despite the difficulties her parents have been through. Are you surprised by the bond between Sierra and her parents?
   
4. Jason and Regan were close friends—and almost dated—in high school and have recently reconnected. Do you understand the friendship they share even after all those years of not being
   in touch? Do you think Nora should be concerned about the time Jason spends with Regan? How would you feel if your spouse were Jason?
   
5. Jason and Nora made the choice not to have children, but when Sierra enters their lives, they find themselves reexamining that decision. Do you think Jason and Nora regret not having children? Can having their niece in their lives serve as some kind of a replacement?
   
6. Jason seems to be having something of a midlife crisis due to losing his job in New York and moving back to his hometown in Ohio. Is it unusual for someone at Jason’s stage of life to be reevaluating this way? Do you think he’s happy with the choices he’s made?
   
7. Regan tells Jason that he “hero-worshipped” Logan and didn’t see him clearly. What kind of person do you think Logan was? Is Regan correct when she says that Jason didn’t see him clearly? What do you think is the cause of some of Logan’s behavior?
   
8. Were you surprised to find out what really happened on graduation night? Are you surprised that Regan was willing to keep it a secret for so many years?
   
9. Logan’s mother knew the truth about her son—both the act of violence he committed against her as well as what he did on
   graduation night. Was she right to keep those things secret for so many years? Do you think she could have—or should have—done something to help her son, or were the cards too stacked against her because of the influence and power of Logan’s father?
   
10. Mr. Shaw seems like something of a distant and distracted father. Do you blame him for Logan’s behavior? Do you think he really loved his son?
    
11. Jesse Dean was responsible for Logan’s death on graduation night, and then Derrick was responsible for Jesse Dean’s death in the cabin. Do you blame these men for the acts of violence they committed? Were there extenuating circumstances in one or both of the cases? How do you view the men differently? Would you want to see them prosecuted for the things they did?
    
12. When Jason returns home at the end of the book, he seems genuinely happy to see his family, including Hayden and Sierra. Do you think he has a new appreciation for his life, one he didn’t have when the book started? Do you think he and Nora have found a way to be happy in Ohio?
    
13. Sierra turns out very different from her parents. And despite being siblings, Jason and Hayden take divergent paths in life. Do you attribute these differences to nature over nurture? Do you know people who turned out significantly different from other people in the same
    household?
    

Chapter One

When I saw the girl in the grocery store, my heart stopped.

I turned the corner into the dairy aisle, carrying my basket with just a few purchases inside. Cereal. Crackers. Spaghetti. Beer. I lived alone and rarely cooked. I almost ran into the girl. I stopped and saw her in profile, her hand raised to her mouth while she studied products through the glass door of the dairy cooler.

I felt like I was seeing a ghost.

She looked just like my college girlfriend, Marissa Minor, the only woman I ever really loved. Probably the only woman who ever really loved me.

The girl didn’t see me right away. She continued to study the items in the dairy cooler, slowly walking away from me, her hand still raised to her mouth as though that helped her think.

That was the gesture that really got me. It made my insides go cold. Not with fear, but with shock. With feelings I hadn’t experienced in years.

Marissa used to do that very same thing. When she thought, she’d place her right hand on her lips, sometimes pinching them between her index finger and thumb. Marissa’s lips were always bright red—without lipstick—and full, and the gesture, that lip-twisting, thoughtful gesture, drove me wild with love and, yes, desire.

I was eighteen when I met Marissa. Desire was always close at hand.

But it wasn’t just the gesture this girl shared with Marissa. Her hair, thick and deep orange, matched Marissa’s exactly, down to the length, which fell just below her shoulders. From the side, the girl’s nose came to a slightly rounded point, one that Marissa said looked like a lightbulb. Both the girl and Marissa had long, slender bodies. This girl, the one in the store, looked shorter than Marissa by a few inches, and she wore tight jeans and knee-high boots, clothes that weren’t in style when I attended college.

But other than that, they were twins. They really were.

And as the girl walked away, turning the corner at the end of the aisle and leaving my sight, I remained rooted to my spot, my silly little grocery basket dangling from my right hand. The lights above were bright, painfully so, and other shoppers came past with their carts and their kids and their lives. It was close to dinnertime, and people had places to go. Families to feed.

I stood there.

I felt tears rising in my eyes, my vision starting to blur.

She looked so much like Marissa. So much.

And Marissa had been dead for just over twenty years.

*   *   *

I snapped out of it.

I reached up with my free hand and wiped away the tears.

No one seemed to notice that I was having an emotional moment in the middle of the grocery store, in the dairy aisle. To anyone passing by, I looked like a normal guy. Forty years old. Clean-cut. Professional. I had my problems. I was divorced. My ex-wife didn’t let me see her son from a previous relationship as much as I wanted.
He wasn’t my kid, but we’d grown close. My job didn’t pay enough, but who ever felt like they were paid enough?

Like I said, I looked like a regular guy.

I needed to talk to that girl. I started down the aisle, my basket swinging at my side. I figured she had to be a relative of Marissa’s, right? A cousin or something. I turned the corner in the direction she had gone, dodging between my fellow shoppers.

I looked up the next aisle and didn’t see her. Then I went to the next one, the last aisle in the store. At first, I didn’t see her there either. It was crowded, and a family of four—two parents, two kids—blocked my view. One of the kids screamed because her mom wouldn’t buy her the ice cream she wanted.

But then they moved, and I saw the girl. She was halfway up, opening another one of the cooler doors, but not removing anything. She lifted her hand to her mouth again. That gesture. She looked just like Marissa.

I felt the tears again and fought back against them.

I walked up to her. She looked so small. And young. I guessed she was about twenty, probably a student at my alma mater, Eastland University. I felt ridiculous, but I had to ask. I wiped at my eyes again and cleared my throat.

“Excuse me,” I said.

She whipped her head around in my direction. She seemed startled that anyone spoke to her.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

But I really wasn’t. I finally saw her head-on, and the illusion that she looked like Marissa wasn’t shattered. Her forehead was a little wider than Marissa’s. And her chin came to a sharper point. But the spray of freckles, the color and shape of her eyes . . . all of it.

If I believed in ghosts . . .

Ghosts from a happier time in my past . . .

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

The girl just looked at me. Her eyes moved across my body, sizing me up. Taking me in. She looked guarded.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I was wondering if you were related to the Minor family,” I said. “They lived in Hanford, Ohio. It’s been about twenty years since I’ve seen them. I know it’s a long shot—”

The girl had been carrying a box of cereal and a carton of organic milk. When I said the name “Minor,” she let the milk and the cereal go, and they both fell to the floor at my feet. The milk was in a cardboard carton, but the force of it hitting the ground caused a split. Milk started leaking out onto the dirty floor, flowing toward my shoes.

“Careful,” I said.

But the girl took off. She made an abrupt turn on her heel and started walking away briskly, her boots clacking against the linoleum. She didn’t look back. When she reached the far end of the aisle, the end that was closest to the cash registers, she started running.

I took one step in that direction, lifting my hand. I wanted to say something. Apologize. Call her back. Let her know that I hadn’t meant any harm.

But she was gone. Just like Marissa, she was gone.

The family of four, the one with the child screaming for ice cream, came abreast of me. Their child appeared to have calmed down. She clutched a carton of Rocky Road, the tears on her face drying. The father pointed to the mess on the floor, the leaking milk and the cereal.

“Something wrong with her?” he asked.

My hands were shaking. I felt off-balance. Above my head, the cloying Muzak continued to play, indifferent to my little drama with the girl who looked so much like Marissa.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t even know who she
was.”

I thought about Marissa a lot that evening.

It’s safe to say I was feeling sorry for myself. Indulging in nostalgia and self-pity at the same time.

I drank beer on the couch in my apartment while a basketball game I didn’t care about played on the TV. A pile of work waited in my briefcase, but I ignored it. I ate some cheese and crackers but gave up on my plan to cook the spaghetti I had bought at the store. My only company was Riley, my aged mutt, whom I had rescued from the local Humane Society shortly after my divorce. By the Humane Society’s estimates, Riley was at least twelve, maybe older. He didn’t like to do much. As I sat on the couch brooding, he sat at my feet, hoping for cracker crumbs.

Marissa and I had met during our freshman year at Eastland. We fell in love right away. She got me like no one ever had. And no one has since. I didn’t even have to say anything to her, and she understood me. How many people meet someone like that in their lives? I did. And then it was all taken away in a house fire when we were juniors in college.

That was why seeing the girl in the grocery store shook me to the core. I’d managed to go on with my life. I’d managed to tell myself I’d gotten over Marissa and her loss.

But I hadn’t.

That was why I sat on my couch drinking beer that night. I never drank very much, never more than one in a day, if that. But when I came home from the grocery store, I threw back three and then four and opened a fifth, wondering who that girl was. And why she had acted so spooked when I spoke to her.

*   *   *

I fell asleep on the couch, the TV still playing, the open but unfinished fifth beer on the coffee table before me. My neck felt like hell from sleeping at an odd angle, and a trail of drool ran down my chin.

Something pounded against my apartment door.

Someone was there, beating on the door. Each heavy knock caused a miniature earthquake in my skull. I winced. A hangover at my age. Pathetic. I vowed to never have more than one beer again. I vowed to stop thinking about Marissa.

I’d do anything if the person outside my apartment would stop hammering on the door. But they didn’t.

I looked at the clock. Six fifty-three a.m.

I normally woke up around eight. Made it to the office by nine. I felt like shit. I needed a shower. Coffee. Food. I stood up, feeling a little wobbly. I looked down at Riley. He hadn’t barked despite the pounding on the door. He never barked.

“Nothing?” I said to him. “Not even a growl?”

His tail thumped against the floor. He yawned.

“One of these days, I’m really going to need your help,” I said. “I hope you’re ready.”

Riley walked off toward the kitchen, which meant he was hungry.

I still wore the pants and collared shirt from the previous
day’s work at the Housing Authority. My tie and my shoes were off, and I needed to pee. But whoever was outside the door really wanted to talk to me. They pounded again, shaking my brain.

“Stop,” I said. “Jesus.”

I thought about calling the apartment complex’s security guard and asking him to come by to see who was making the racket. It wasn’t the knock of a friend or someone selling something. But my desire to make them stop overwhelmed any fears I had about who was out there. I stumbled to the door and looked through the peephole.

It took a moment for the scene outside to make sense to me, but when it did, my heart started racing.

I understood why the knock was so heavy.

Through the peephole I saw two uniformed police officers and a detective I already knew.

“Mr. Hansen?” the detective said. “Nick Hansen? We know you’re in there. Open up.”

“Shit,” I said.

A rough morning just became rougher.

*   *   *

The morning sun nearly killed me.

It poured in when I opened the door, its rays penetrating my eyeballs like knitting needles. I took a step back, feeling like a man under siege.

“Can we come in?” the detective said.

I didn’t have to answer. He was already stepping across the threshold with the two uniformed officers right behind him.

“You can do anything if it means you’ll stop knocking,” I said.

Detective Reece stood about five nine, a few inches shorter
than me, but he was powerfully and compactly built. I suspected he had wrestled in high school. Or maybe played nose tackle at a small college. He looked like that kind of guy. He didn’t offer to shake my hand, but I’d shaken it before, the last time he and I had encountered each other. He had nearly crushed my fingers.

Reece saw the beer cans on the coffee table, and his eyebrows went up. He was probably a few years younger than me, and his hair was thinning. He wore it cropped close to his head, and his suit coat looked too small for him.

“It’s recycling day,” I said.

“Think green, right?”

“Exactly,” I said.

He pointed at Riley. “Does the dog bite?”

“Only his food,” I said, trying to sound light.

But Reece wasn’t smiling. He looked around the room, taking it all in. The TV still played with the sound down. It showed highlights of a hockey game. There were dirty dishes in the sink, discarded gym clothes on the floor. I needed to pick up, and I would have, if only I’d known the police were going to drop by.

“Have you seen your ex-wife lately?” Reece asked.

“Not in six weeks,” I said. “Not since . . . that night we met.”

“The night of the late unpleasantness,” Reece said.

“I wasn’t stalking her.”

“She said you were.”

“I was trying to see Andrew,” I said. “I told you that then.”

“Her son from a previous relationship,” Reece said. He stopped looking around and turned to face me. The two uniformed officers stayed near the front door. They acted like they didn’t hear anything we said. “Not your son.”

“Gina and I were married five years. I got to know Andrew
well. We became close, and I just want to see him from time to time. It’s not unusual. I just wanted to see the kid.”

“But she didn’t want you there, and you showed up anyway.”

“Is that what this is about?” I asked. “Did Gina decide to press charges? That was six weeks ago. I thought it was over.”

Reece gestured toward my cluttered dining room table. “Why don’t we sit down and talk, Mr. Hansen?” He waited for me to move. “Please?”

He acted like it was his apartment, and I was the guest. He’d reversed everything and taken over my turf. I couldn’t say anything to stop him, so I sat down. Reece took the seat across from me, and he reached out with his hand and brushed some old crumbs off the table and onto the floor. Then he took out his phone and started scrolling through it. I waited. For all I knew, he was checking his Twitter feed or looking up movie times.

“Can I ask—”

“Where were you last night, Mr. Hansen?” Reece asked.

I looked over at the beer cans on the coffee table, the deep indentation in the couch where I’d slept without a pillow or a blanket.

“I was here,” I said.

“All night?”

“All night.”

“Were you alone?”

“Yes. I usually am these days. Riley was here.”

“What time did you get home from work?” Reece asked.

“About six fifteen.”

Reece nodded. He looked down at his phone, tapped it a few times, and then looked back up at me. “I’m going to show you a photograph of someone. I want you to tell me if you know this
person, and if you do know them, I want you to tell me where you know them from.”

“Okay.”

He turned the phone around so that I could see the photo. I should have guessed who it was going to be before he even handed it to me.

It was a photo of the girl from the grocery store.